Dead Elm
I’d been eying that dead Elm, standing at the edge of the field, for firewood.
A ghostly figure, standing tall amid all green late summer.
Probably made it 30 years before the disease found it. Succumbing to join its brethren.
Yet, it stood. Dried and stripped of color by the sun that had once been sustaining.
Light, now pealed bark, leaves long gone from brittle branches.
As I considered my approach, angle of attack, orange saw in hand,
A hairy woodpecker eyed me from neighboring scrag, his sideways glance disapproving.
Knowing what havoc the monster in my hands could reap.
He’d been cultivating that dead Elm for years, perhaps generations of woodpecker.
The resistant wood just now ripe with perforations to absorb the larvae
His garden, standing against time and the pull of gravity.
To be undone by my wanton display of petroleum addled entropy.
All that patient work, to grow a woodpecker garden.
Ok, I said. It’s yours for now.
But when the winter winds take it down.
My turn.
